Shadowkeep Notes and Thumbnail

Shadowkeep’s soundtrack is good. As usual, Destiny makes most video game music look like a weak tribute act, but nonetheless… I was disappointed. Considering how important music is to me in this franchise, it didn’t feel good to say that. There are tracks on Forsakens released and unreleased OSTs that you could have said were composed by Hans Zimmer and I would thought, wow, Zimmer’s done it again. Riven of a Thousand Voices, The Watchtower, these tracks and their numerous remixes I truly believe are musical masterpieces, sitting up there with Deus Ex’s Icarus and Darksiders 2’s Corruption Melody. Micheal Salvatori has soldified himself as a titan of not just video game composition but the art of music in general. It honestly baffled me that the best of his work hasn’t even been released. But the reason I’m saying all this is because Shadowkeep doesn’t even come close in my opinion. It bombards the ears with loud aggressive synths, has few standout melodies, the melodies it does have are all over the place and they constantly repeat extremely generic horror motifs. Compared to the standouts of Forsaken’s soundtrack, the melodies are far weaker and far more erratic, creating far fewer engrossing, memorable tunes. The percussion is vastly weaker to make way for the synths, and that just doesn’t create the same badass, driving sensation as previous soundtracks. Of course, Shadowkeep has a different focus, but this same franchise has done the hive and the moon far better before in my opinion. Though disappointing, I should clarify, it’s not bad. It’s still very good. Eye of storm, Eden, Heretical Omen and Hashladun’s Fall were my favourites.

The deathbringer quest is a long one so strap in. First step is to explore every lost sector, then you have to go to the back of the hardest one and open a door. Nothing strange here. Now, you need to kill nightmares with arc abilities. Oh boy, I hope you enjoy a bunch of wasteman blueberries swooping your kills when you get em low. This isn’t too lengthy, thank god. Next, you have to interrupt a ritual near the circle of bones, fairly simple stuff. But because we like bones now, we need to get more bones. First, the bone collector, who you’ll need a guide to find. The other two just require a public event and a lost sector clear. Decent so far, but there are a couple frustrating elements. Now, we need to farm. Big yellow bars, medium yellow bars and red bars. 500 red bars, by my estimate. Fun fun fun. And that leads us into the final mission. The deathsinger’s aria. I gotta hand it to Bungie, this was better than most of the main missions. The unique gameplay mechanic is that there’s a deathsinger in the back of each arena, and after 1 minute, the deathsong will kill you. You can restart the deathsong by popping the singer’s shield, and that encourages good elemental weapon choice, risky plays to get to the back quick, and very very efficient combat. It’s a tense mechanic, and I like that. It does get a bit drawn out by the final boss however, because to excuse itself as a final boss, it decides that instead of making the deathsinger cool and interesting, it’s just going to throw a literal battalion of acolytes, ogres and thrall at you. Since the deathsinger stays in range, it also doesn’t have that tense risk element, because anything with void energy will easily pop the shield.